MIKE JORDAN: A PROPER NATIONAL RACING TREASURE
From humble beginnings to winning the British Touring Car Championship with a family team, Mike Jordan has been a key player in national racing for four decades.
He started his racing in a Morris Minor and progressed into Porsches, where he built an enviable reputation for preparing customer cars. His own racing took him into Eurocars, TVR Tuscans and GT racing before stepping up into the BTCC.
He was later joined by his sonAndrew in a two-car team as Jordan Jr started a BTCC career that would take him to the 2013 title with their own outfit.
In more recent years, the focus of Mike’s racing has moved to historic racing and the success has continued. The business, Jordan Racing Team, too, is now centred on historic racing with a host of cars tended for owners.
WithAndrew increasingly taking the lead in the business, Mike is thinking about backing off a little, but he’s still a supremely competitive racer.
Question: Did the Porsche racing story start with you rolling a car that was for sale on a test day and then feeling obliged to buy it?
David Addison Via email
Mike Jordan: “No, he is close. But MrAddison is actually wrong, which is great! It was for sale from PCT cars in Birmingham and I borrowed it and I went to the last round of the Giroflex Porsche series in 1986.
“I’d never driven a 911 race car before, and it was peeing with rain in qualifying and I put it on pole, and I thought this was great. Then I slid a bit wide at Clearways, got in the gravel and put it on its side. But it didn’t go right over.All we had to do was roll it back down onto its wheels and get the gravel out of the tyre sidewalls.And then we went and won the race. So, he’s close but he was wrong!”
Question: Where did the interest in motorsport come from? What would you have been if you weren’t a racing driver?
Jason Inglis Via email
MJ: “My dad,Alf, was really into his cars, he loved them. He had a friend who did a little bit of racing in an ERAand my dad used to go with him to help back in the 1950s.And they went to spectate at Le Mans in 1955. He was a newspaper sales representative and from the little I can remember I can recall him sliding everything from hisAustin 1100 to HillmanAvengers around every wet roundabout.
“But then he’d sort of gone away from racing until I pestered him and pestered him from being about 10 years old to want to go to a motor race.And he finally took me to Mallory Park when I was 14, to my first-ever race.And that was it.
“At that first meeting, there was Dave Brodie, in his Mk1 Escort, ‘Run Baby Run’. So, I absolutely adored those sort of Special Saloons and Formula 5000 was really strong as well. Once we’d been once, then every weekend, all I wanted to do was to go to motor racing.
“In Formula 5000, Steve Thompson was good at the time, and he was a car dealer in Walsall and his garage was opposite where my dad’s Birmingham Post and Mail office was. So, Thompson was a real
